In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a time when I u...

TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- 02/17/13 -- Across Ontario, 167 elementary schools showed significant improvement in their academic performance over the past five years, according to the Fraser Institute's annual school rankings.

Of these improving elementary schools, 64 are in the GTA, 44 in Southwestern Ontario, 36 in North Central Ontario, and 23 in Eastern Ontario, highlighting the fact that school improvement is happening in all regions of the province.

"This is why the Fraser Institute school report card is the go-to source for measuring academic improvement: it highlights school success stories from Murillo in the west to Cornwall in the east and from Timmins in the north to Windsor in the south," said Peter Cowley, Fraser Institute director of school performance studies.

"Our report shows that all schools are capable of improvement, regardless of the personal or family challenges their students might face. If educators want to help students learn and improve, they should be talking to these schools."

"By pinpointing the subject areas in which individual schools are improving or declining and how their academic performance compares to that of other Ontario schools over the past five years, our report helps parents and educators prioritize learning challenges in their schools," Cowley said.

The report card also includes important information about each school's make-up, including parents' average income, the percentage of ESL students, and the percentage of special needs students.

The complete results for all 2,714 elementary schools will also be available at www.compareschoolrankings.org where visitors can compare schools on their results over the last five years.

Of the 20 Ontario elementary schools showing the fastest academic improvement over the past five years, 10 are public schools where the parental income is below average. At eight of those schools, special needs students account for more than 30 per cent of school enrolment. The complete list follows.

"We all want the best possible education for our children. To achieve this, every Ontario school should make improvement Job 1," Cowley said.

The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal and ties to a global network of 86 think-tanks. Its mission is to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government intervention on the welfare of individuals. To protect the Institute's independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research. Visit www.fraserinstitute.org.

"We started a Master of Science in business analytics - that's the hot topic. We serve the business community around San Francisco so we educate the working professionals and this is where they all want to be," explained Judy Lee, Associate Professor and Department Chair at Golden Gate...

There is a huge demand for responsive, real-time mobile and web experiences, but current architectural patterns do not easily accommodate applications that respond to events in real time. Common solutions using message queues or HTTP long-polling quickly lead to resiliency, scalability...

We call it DevOps but much of the time there’s a lot more discussion about the needs and concerns of developers than there is about other groups. There’s a focus on improved and less isolated developer workflows. There are many discussions around collaboration, continuous integration a...

The dynamic nature of the cloud means that change is a constant when it comes to modern cloud-based infrastructure. Delivering modern applications to end users, therefore, is a constantly shifting challenge. Delivery automation helps IT Ops teams ensure that apps are providing an optim...

Modern software design has fundamentally changed how we manage applications, causing many to turn to containers as the new virtual machine for resource management. As container adoption grows beyond stateless applications to stateful workloads, the need for persistent storage is founda...

"CA has been doing a lot of things in the area of DevOps. Now we have a complete set of tool sets in order to enable customers to go all the way from planning to development to testing down to release into the operations," explained Aruna Ravichandran, Vice President of Global Marketin...